An ongoing nationwide cell phone outage has disconnected thousands of people since this morning including many in Maricopa. 

Catherine Fletcher Harmon, who lives in The Lakes, saw the dreaded letters “SOS” on her cell phone’s status bar when she woke up this morning. 

“We have internet but can’t place calls,” Harmon said. 

InMaricopa was contacted by six other people whose phones were down today.  

According to Downdetector.com — a website that monitors real-time outages — Verizon users are the most affected by the outage followed by AT&T, T-Mobile and other American carriers. 

The website lists Phoenix as one of the most impacted cities with more than 5,100 reports at 8:40 a.m. The number of reports had dropped to around 1,600 at 11:40 a.m.  

Both iPhone and Android Verizon users were commenting on the website about not being able to place nor receive calls, going on four hours. 

The outage seems to be hitting users sporadically as people were commenting that although their phone was experiencing the outage, others within their household, who were also on Verizon, were not. 

“We are aware of an issue impacting service for some customers,” Verizon News posted on X, formerly Twitter, around 10 a.m. “Our engineers are engaged, and we are working quickly to identify and solve the issue.”  

Affected iPhone users’ phones are stuck in SOS mode only allowing emergency calls via satellite.  

According to Apple, when users make an SOS call the phone automatically calls the local emergency number and shares their location information with emergency services.  

Monica Williams, spokesperson for the city, said the outage is not affecting city operations

“Everything is operating as normal,” she said.  

Williams noted her personal phone was affected in the outage but not her work phone.  

The city’s cellular provider has “lines that are designated for public safety and that company gives priority sometimes to those lines to ensure that public safety is not impacted,” Williams said. 

When InMaricopa tried to contact the local Verizon store on John Wayne Parkway in the Fry’s Marketplace plaza to see if it had any information regarding the outage, wait times were said to be more than five minutes. However, a reporter sat on the phone for almost 20 minutes and after opting to be called back still hadn’t received a call after an hour.  

It is still unclear when the outage will be resolved.